Comments on: Framing Theory’s Empire

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:27:35 +0000

28: I’ve often pondered that myself, greatzamfir.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a course was taught with the same name in some media studies department somewhere.

Actually it would be interesting to read a book on political philosophy that focussed on analogies between effective government and good system design in the engineering sense. One of the advantages of democracy strikes me as being the feedback loop.

By: GreatZamfir

GreatZamfir — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:17:38 +0000

26: I was sort of hoping there was a course with this name that taught about the System and how it controls people. It would be nice if there existed both courses that teach how you can control systems, and courses that teach how the systen controls you.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:27:03 +0000

Thanks to Ajl and Hogan for the explanations.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:25:35 +0000

18. Great Zamfir – your definition sounds like my course. Feedback loops to control systems. Poles and zeros and jokes about simple Poles in a complex plane.

By: magistra

magistra — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:07:14 +0000

23 – never mind theories on literature, there is a whole theory of ‘who the artist is’ just in that one comment.

By: Michael Bérubé

Michael Bérubé — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:46:05 +0000

It turns out making books is hard and time consuming

And if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it.

By: John Holbo

John Holbo — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:42:09 +0000

“co-designed the book in the same sense that Stan Lee co-created Spiderman”

I DID make sure to put her name first, which is more than Stan the Man ever did. (Lee and Kirby. Who thinks that’s the right order?) I think my dear wife twitted me because she feels entitled to more praise for having done the actual construction. (Assembling boxes is a chore.) This is fair enough. I conceived it. We designed it. She constructed it.

By: Hogan

Hogan — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:49:10 +0000

I call it a “work.” Makes me feel more Marxist.

By: ajl

ajl — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:26:28 +0000

Ah, I see. As a book partisan, I must have been going to cocktail parties on enemy turf.

By: SEK

SEK — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:25:06 +0000

Also, you are required to call it a “text” instead of a “book.”

Not true. You’re merely required to have strong feelings as to whether you call it a “text” or a “book.”

By: ajl

ajl — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:16:56 +0000

16 –
Speaking as a lay person wedded to a disillusioned ex-practitioner of capital-T Theory, I’d define it thusly:

“Theory” is a broad term for all the myriad ways of reading literature that involve ignoring the narrative completely and focusing on the political, sociological, philosophical, psychosexual, metaphysical, anthropological, and possibly gastronomical implications of the book. Also, you are required to call it a “text” instead of a “book.”

Hope that helps.

By: Great Zamfir

Great Zamfir — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:09:25 +0000

16. What is ‘Systems and control’ about? I once had a subject with exactly the same name, but your post made me think about the myriad of other subjects that could be treated under that name (mine was about feedback loops to, well, control systems)

By: Hogan

Hogan — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:55:48 +0000

I remember Theory as a move away from direct textual exegesis to consideration of how texts and exegeses are produced in the first place: interrogation of reading and writing as embedded in and inflected by the cultural, intellectual, institutional etc. settings in which they take place. Once that becomes your topic, literary texts (e.g., Balzac’s Sarrasine) become occasions for self-conscious displays of exegetical virtuosity (e.g., Barthes’s S/Z) or meditations on the not always conscious sources of one’s own typical interpretive moves (e.g., every deconstruction of a literary text was supposed to end with a deconstruction of the deconstruction), and the real action is not in those texts but in theories of and approaches to interpretation (if “interpretation” is the word I’m looking for), at which point your main interest is Continental philosophy or cultural anthropology or Lacanian psychoanalysis, but not Tennyson’s prosody or Woolf’s imagery or the philology of the East Midlands dialect of Middle English. It was kind of a return of the repressed after the “New Criticism,” which ruled out any consideration of the context of literary production as one or another fallacy, had attained total scholastic aridity .

It made for some brilliant intellectual work, a lot of jargon-based posing, bitterly fought institutional politics, and excellent departmental cocktail parties. My contribution was mainly to the posing and the cocktail parties.

Hope this helps the beginners. The book sounds like difficult fun.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:21:34 +0000

9. Hmm, not quite the simple definition I was hoping for.

Though I am reminded of my Systems and Control lecturer’s advice that ypu should never call anything you’ve invented “new” or “modern”.

By: Tom Scudder

Tom Scudder — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:35:02 +0000

6 - so you co-designed the book in the same sense that Stan Lee co-created Spiderman